Re: Why article numbers?

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
> You enter a group.  The server says that the available articles are
> 50000-60000.  You have a list of, er, ids.  How many articles should
> you fetch if the user wants all unread articles?

Don't ask for a particular number of articles.  Ask for "all unread
articles".  Require backends to store marks, so they can figure out
which articles are unread.

Also note that numbers are still very natural article identifiers for
some backends, like nntp.  Those backends could continue to use
numbers, and could do range compression in their storage.  We would
only *allow* identifiers to be non-numeric, not require it.  The only
requirement would be that identifiers must satisfy eq if they are
supposed to identify the same article.  Then the code that takes
advantage of numeric identifiers can be pushed to the other side of
the backend interface.  It would be a lot of work, but I don't think
there any any inherent problems beyond that.

> You want to mark the unseen messages as unseen.  Keep a list of all
> seen ids?

nnmaildir already keeps a list of all 'read articles, and would do the
same for 'seen if those were passed to the backend (as I think they
should be).


paul